Sorry , dear readers , but the crop circle discovered last week etched in a farmer 's barley field in Chualar , California , was not created by aliens .

Instead -- surprise ! -- it was a stunt intended to attract publicity to the release of a mobile processor used in automobiles , tablets and cell phones made by the computer graphics company NVIDIA , according to its president and CEO , Jen-Hsun Huang .

`` It is true . The NVIDIA marketing team is behind this phenomenon , '' Huang said as he stood in front of a picture of the manicured field . `` What you 're looking at here is 310 feet in diameter . It is what people call a crop circle . ''

Huang made the announcement during a keynote address Sunday night at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas .

`` It 's like , out of this world , it 's practically built by aliens , '' Huang said , referring to the new Tegra K1 graphics chip .

Elaborate crop circle in California mowed down

Brett Murray , who works as a marketer for the company , told CNN in a telephone interview that the idea emerged during a brainstorming session in early December about how to introduce the new product .

They came up with the tag line , `` Impossibly advanced , '' then tried to figure out how to `` get some noise '' around it , he said .

From `` impossibly advanced '' to `` aliens '' was not a big leap . `` We eventually said , ` You know , what 's graceful and alien ? Crop circles . ' ''

They then set to work , swearing everyone to secrecy , hiring a Hollywood location scout to find `` the perfect field in Northern California , '' and flying in a British group who have made crop circles before .

Starting buzz for the creation , the company called anonymous tip lines for news stations in the Bay Area , telling them : `` Something 's going on out in Chualar . ''

A crudely made video also popped up on YouTube purporting to show two men -- in reality , Murray and another NVIDIA employee -- getting out of a car and looking at strange lights coming from the farmer 's field and then stumbling toward them .

By the morning of December 30 , the news trucks were rolling in and , with them , throngs of curious onlookers . The company hired security to keep them from trampling over the farmer 's fields .

Murray described the crop circle as `` a puzzle out there for the world to solve . ''

The puzzle included clues to who was behind it -- for example , the number 192 is posted in two ways in the design -- as numbers on a clock and as a Braille representation .

That 's the number of graphical processing unit cores in the new chip . At least one person appears to have figured it all out . John Van Vliet posted this at 12:16 a.m. Wednesday , January 1 , on doubtfulnews.com : `` The crop art really dose -LRB- sic -RRB- look like a graphics GPU chip if i had to bet ... one of the NEW CPU/GPU combos from AMD or Nvidia or intell . ''

Murray said he understood why the story attracted so much attention . `` This is like Santa Claus , '' he said . `` People want to believe . ''

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The crop circle is a publicity stunt

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It 's being used to call attention to a new mobile processor

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Computer graphics company NVIDIA developed the chip

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The PR company made anonymous tips to local TV stations